Holes Friendship Quotes

I wish I could draw you how I see you. I'd draw a boy with the most magnetic smile, and the kindest hands, and eyes that are gloomy, but can sometimes be bright. I'd draw a boy who deserves to see the ocean.

Don't underestimate the power of friendship. Those bonds are tight stitches that close up the holes you might otherwise fall through.

Love can give you such happiness, then can break the very heart it filled, leaving a hole that can never be fixed or protected by any armour.

Sam," she said. "I'm trying!" "Sam," she repeated. "No," he spat, hearing her tone. "No!" He began screaming for help then. Celaena pressed her face to one of the holes in the grate. Help wasn't going to come-not fast enough. "Please," Sam begged as he beat and yanked on the grate, he tried to wedge another dagger under the lid. "Please don't." She knew he wasn't speaking to her. The water hit her neck. "Please," Sam moaned, his fingers now touching hers. She'd have one last breath. Her last words. "Take my body home to Terrasen, Sam," she whispered. And with a gasping breath, she went under.

Hidden yourself in a hole and dared to burden no one with your grievous friendship? I will have friends, Katsa. I will have a life, even though I carry this burden.

I feel as if something has been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn't be I — as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn't get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It's good to see you again — it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul.

The bark on the tree was just a little softer.

Man ordinarily lives in loneliness. To avoid loneliness, he creates all kinds of relationships, friendships, organizations, political parties, religions and what not. But the basic thing is that he is very much afraid of being lonely. Loneliness is a black hole, a darkness, a frightening negative state almost like death … as if you are being swallowed by death itself. To avoid it, you run out and fall into anybody, just to hold somebody’s hand, to feel that you are not lonely… Nothing hurts more than loneliness. But the trouble is, any relationship that arises out of the fear of being lonely is not going to be a blissful experience, because the other is also joining you out of fear. You both call it love. You are both deceiving yourself and the other. It is simply fear, and fear can never be the source of love. Only those who love are absolutely fearless; only those who love are able to be alone, joyously, whose need for the other has disappeared, who are sufficient unto themselves… The day you decide that all these efforts are failures, that your loneliness has remained untouched by all your efforts, that is a great moment of understanding. Then only one thing remains: to see whether loneliness is such a thing that you should be afraid of, or if it is just your nature. Then rather than running out and away, you close your eyes and go in. Suddenly the night is over, and a new dawn … The loneliness transforms into aloneness. Aloneness is your nature. You were born alone, you will die alone. And you are living alone without understanding it, without being fully aware of it. You misunderstand aloneness as loneliness; it is simply a misunderstanding. You are sufficient unto yourself.

Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tenderness in her, so much of wanting to give of herself to whoever needed what she had, whether it was her money, her time, the clothes off her back, her pity, her understanding, her friendship or her companionship and love. She was mother to everything that came her way. She loved men, yes. She loved women too, and old people and especially children. How she loved children! She loved loved the down-and-outers. She wanted to make everybody happy. She had tried to seduce the good priest who heard her infrequent confessions because she felt sorry for him. She thought he was missing the greatest joy on earth by being committed to a life of celibacy. She loved all the scratching curs on the street and wept for the gaunt scavenging cats who slunk around Brooklyn corners with their sides swollen looking for a hole in which they might bring forth their young. She loved the sooty sparrows and thought that the very grass that grew in the lots was beautiful. She picked bouquets of white clover in the lots believing they were the most beautiful flowers God ever made...Yes, she listened to everybody's troubles but no one listened to hers. But that was right because Sissy was a giver and never a taker.

He can't make me love him when he's going to leave me.

The dead slip out quietly and leave furious holes in their wake. It’s Fortune’s strong suit. She keeps catching us unprepared, again and again.

A great friend can act like a trash can with a hole in the bottom. To listen to someone else's personal garbage with the same empathy you would spend listening to their joy, and then release that garbage just as quickly as you hear it, without absorbing it, makes you a wonderful friend to that person--and an even better one to yourself.

I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister's maid of honor, it had never occured to me that I would get asked to be in anyone's wedding. I thought we had reached an understanding, the institution of marriage and I. Weddings are the like the triathlon of female friendship: the Shower, the Bachelorette Party, and the Main Event. It's the Iron Woman and most people never make it through. They fall off their bikes or choke on ocean water. I figured if I valued my life, I'd stay away from weddings and they'd stay away from me.

They got a manure machine in there,” Keller said. He went up to the barn and peeked through a hole between tow boards. “On wheels. It’s fun to ride sometimes, when you don’t care how you smell.

Friendships were so damn complicated, so bound with sharp edges that could jab a hole through you at any given point.

Q: Yet, I cannot see how can anything come to be without a cause. M: When I say a thing is without a cause, I mean it can be with-out a particular cause. Your own mother was needed to give you birth; But you could not have been born without the sun and the earth. Even these could not have caused your birth without your own desire to be born. It is desire that gives birth, that gives name and form. The desirable is imagined and wanted and manifests itself as something tangible or con-ceivable. Thus is created the world in which we live, our personal world. The real world is beyond the mind's ken; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. Q: What do you mean by holes? And how to find them? M: Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them -- *your very seeing them will make them go*

I missed him desperately, even though he’d said he hated me, even though his anger—the rampage at his house, the X through his yearbook page, the cruel way he withdrew from everyone—scared me. I didn’t care if he wasn’t my boyfriend, or even my friend. He was my Jonah. I felt more alone without him now than I’d ever felt before I met him. My life had a hole in it.

It’s very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I’m rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I’ve been shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I’ve been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard—the quiet, dusky cupboard where there’s an odour of stale spices—as much as I can. But when I’ve to come out and into a strong light—then, my dear, I’m a horror!

The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole..." Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that. On the wall, he painted a long, tightly knotted rope with a dripping yellow sun at the end of it, as if you could dive right into it. On the ropy cloud, he drew two figures-a thin girl and a withering Jew-and they were walking, arms balanced, toward that dripping sun.

Make your friends a priority, so they are not lost to the black hole of a busy, hurried life.

Friendship means nothing to a man if he has a tempting enough offer.- Harry Hole

I've been saved again and again by angels all around me. Not just from the insane stupidity of banging blow, but from becoming an aimless flounderer. A person who maybe talked a good line about doing shit but never ever put in the word to see things through. I could've easily dug myself into a hole, become someone who never got a clear picture off cause and effect, holistic health, or emotional well-being. I bow before the guardian angels that always showed me a light and a way up. My sanctuaries of friendship, books, basketball, music, and nature kept me sane.

Franny?” Rosy held up the four little Franks. “Could I keep one of these?” Franny looked at her hard for a moment then nodded. “’Course you can, hen,” she said, “But that’s not your daddy.” Rosy gaped. “It’s not?” “That’s my wee darling. That’s my wee Frankie before the devil twisted him into a monster.” She poked her finger into another hole where Frank’s face should have been. Her eyes glinted.

friendship nostalgia i miss the days when my friends knew every mundane detail about my life and i knew every ordinary detail about theirs adulthood has starved me of that consistency​ ​that us those walks around the block those long conversations when we were too lost in the moment to care what time it was when we won-and celebrated when we failed and celebrated even harder when we were just kids now we have our very important jobs that fill up our very busy schedules we have to compare calendars just to plan coffee dates that one of us will eventually cancel because adulthood is being too exhausted to leave our apartments most days i miss belonging to a group of people bigger than myself it was that belonging that made life easier to live how come no one warned us about how we'd graduate and grow apart after everything we'd been through how come no one said one of life's biggest challenges would be trying to stay connected to the people that make us feel alive no one talks about the hole a friend can leave inside you when they go off to make their dreams come true in college we used to stay up till 4 in the morning dreaming of what we'd do the moment we started earning real paychecks now we finally have the money to cross everything off our bucket lists but those lists are collecting dust in some lost corridor of our minds sometimes when i get lonely ​i​ still search for them i'd give anything to go back and do the foolish things we used to do i feel the most present in your presence when we're laughing so hard the past slides off our shoulders and worries of the future slip away the truth is​ ​i couldn't survive without my friends they know exactly what i need before i even know that i need the way we hold each other is just different so forget grabbing coffee i don't want to have another dinner where we sit across from each other at a table reminiscing about old times when we have so much time left to make new memories with how about you go pack your bags and i'll pack mine you take a week off work i'll grab my keys and let's go for ride we've got years of catching up to do

Bruce is still my friend. We don't talk much. We don't have to. He is great and in his own league. I'm not him and he is not me. But we are on similar paths, writing and singing out own kind of songs around the world, along with Bob and a few other singer/songwriters. It is a a silent fraternity of sorts, occupying this space in people's souls with our music. Last year, I lost my right-hand man, the pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith. This year Bruce lost his right-hand man, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons. It's time for another talk; friends can help each other just by being there. Now both of us will look to our right and see a giant hole, a memory, the past and the future. I won't play with another steel player trying to recreate Ben's parts, and I know Bruce won't play with another sax man trying to play Clarence's. Those parts are not going to happen again. They already did. That takes a lot out of our repertoires.

Each of us has a different life puzzle to assemble. The choices you make in the midst of your life journey do have eternal consequences. Yes, you can throw the pieces at God in anger and say, “I do not like the life You have given me, and I refuse to live within these limitations with a humble heart. You have made me a victim. You have ruined my life. I will choose to live in darkness.” If that is your choice, the puzzle of your life will remain fragmented and separated, with holes in the picture. However, if you choose to bow your knee and submit to the varied circumstances of your life, God will do miracles. If you choose to trust and develop your integrity and an inner standard of holiness that isn’t dependent on cultural standards, the puzzle pieces will begin to come together. No matter what your limitations are—health issues, financial problems, a difficult marriage or divorce, a loss of friendship, death of a dream—your life is meant to be filled to the brim with the potential of God’s blessings. But in order to thrive and heal, you must accept any limitations by faith, trust in His faithfulness each step of the way, and wait for His grace so you can live a faithful story right in the place you find yourself.

Well,” I harrumphed, “friendship is a two-way street.” “Sometimes. Not always. When a friend’s in trouble, sometimes friendship is a blind alley, a climb down a rope into a dark hole you’re trying to pull somebody out of, a rescue mission. Of course, it’s nice if the one you’re trying to save cooperates, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re in trouble. And you, of all people, know that.

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers —so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits. There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance, a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther; how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything— how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.

One of the realities of life is that few things of value ever come easy. A great marriage takes years of hard work—every day. There is never a time when I can say that I no longer need to work on being patient, tender, and conversant. I believe that marriage is forever, which means that you work through your problems and learn how to relate to each other no matter what it takes. Hog Hole marriages require daily effort and sacrifice. So do Hog Hole careers, friendships, children, and churches. It’s never easy; few things of value ever are. A Hog Hole life is available to every person, but it takes determination, sacrifice, and work. In a word, discipline.

Maybe that's where it started and they brought it back from the desert, some kind of contagious psychic wound, guilt based. Maybe it's the dark matter, invisibly making up most of the universe. Maybe it was methane thawing at the bottom of the sea, releasing some ancient spore from the melted icebergs. Maybe it was the hole in the ozone, the collapse of the upper atmosphere. Maybe it was the overload of information, the swarms of data generated by every human gesture. Maybe it was the networking craze, the resurrection of dead friendships and memories meant to be lost, now resurfacing like rusted shipwrecks to reclaim our attention and scramble our sense of time. Maybe it was the death of an artist at the hands of a zealot. Maybe it was the particles made to collide. Maybe the mapping of the genome. Maybe the clashing of gods, the tug-of-war over our souls, not one of them refusing to let go, instead opting to see us sliced in two by Soloman's sword. Maybe it was food becoming a prop for food. Maybe it was a distant comet dusting us with its tail of poisoned ice. Maybe it was someone uttering a combination of syllables that should never be uttered. Maybe it was the emergence of collective intelligence, the flattening of the world. Maybe the game we inhabit had a glitch. Maybe the angel's horn had finally been blown.

As he reached the river, Oswald suddenly felt as if he were walking around in a painting. Then it dawned on him. Everywhere he looked was a painting! Everything was alive with color: the water, the sky, the boathouses that lined the river with red tin roofs, silver tin roofs, and rusted orange tin roofs. Red boat in a yellow boathouse. Green, pink, blue, tan, yellow, and white boathouses. The wooden pilings sticking out of the water were a thousand different shades of gray and each individual piling was encrusted with hundreds of chalk-white barnacles and black woodpecker holes. Even the grain of the wood and the knots on each post differed from inch to inch and pole to pole.

Ow! That’s my leg, you know.” She rubbed the sore spot. “I’m gonna have a big bruise there now. Thanks a lot.” “Just tell everyone you had to fend off a pack of unicorns with your bare hands. ‘Cause you were just walking around, minding your own business, cavorting with nature, when a bunch of unicorns descended upon you unexpectedly, and wanted to practice their horn- fighting with a human, just in case they happened upon a wizard and they had to battle to stay free. A wizard would use his wand, so you grabbed a stick, but the stick broke, so you only had your hands. And one of the unicorns’ horns went through your leg, and ‘cause their horns have healing qualities or whatever, the hole healed, but he was just a young unicorn, so his powers hadn’t developed fully yet, and so you were left with this battle scar that’ll mark you as a hero for the rest of your life.” There was a brief silence. “You’re full of crap, you know that, right?” “Yup. But I feel better for it.

Q: Yet, I cannot see how can anything come to be without a cause. M: When I say a thing is without a cause, I mean it can be with-out a particular cause. Your own mother was needed to give you birth; But you could not have been born without the sun and the earth. Even these could not have caused your birth without your own desire to be born. It is desire that gives birth, that gives name and form. The desirable is imagined and wanted and manifests itself as something tangible or con-ceivable. Thus is created the world in which we live, our personal world. The real world is beyond the mind's ken; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. Q: What do you mean by holes? And how to find them? M: Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them -- your very seeing them will make them go.

Ahmity reached out and created a ball of light in his hand sending it down past Jack and into the cave. He called out to Jack, “It will move as you command.” Jack frowned feeling a bit ridiculous talking to a ball of light and said, “Go three feet inside the cave and hover.” The ball floated quickly to the cave entrance and past the rushing water to hover just inside the cave entrance. “Move further in another 5 feet.” There was a large shadow to the right. “Move right 10 feet.” Jack commanded and the ball floated into a side tunnel and disappeared. Jack said, “Return to Ahmity.” The ball slowly accompanied Jack back up the cliff. When he reached the top Ahmity helped him up over the edge and waited for his report. Jack wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “I could see a tunnel in the side of the cave about 10 feet inside the entrance. It’s large enough for the trolls pass through.” Ahmity shook his head and said, “If the trolls traveled back to the Netherworld from here then it’s possible the beasts escaped the same way.” Jack sighed and glanced back at the school then said, “Well there’s no way to know for sure unless we take a short trip down a black hole.” Coming soon--Vengeance's Fire

You want us to love you, is that right? Love, Tabitha Crum, is to be earned, not given away to just anyone like a festering case of fleas. She'd been seven when her mother had made the comparison of love and irritable itching. Tabitha remembered the statement quite well because it was the same year children at school had suddenly gotten it in their heads that she had a case of head lice. That had been a difficult time and nobody had gotten close to Tabitha since. Of course, with the addition of a pet mouse over the last year, her lack of friendship could perhaps be further explained by the misapprehension that she spoke to herself. Pemberley was a most excellent consultant in all matters, but he tended to stay out of sight, so Tabitha could somewhat understand the slanderous comments. Or it might have been the unfortunate, uneven unattractive, blunt-scissored haircut her mother was so fond of giving her. Or it could have been the simple truth that making friends can be an awkward and a difficult thing when it's a one-sided endeavor and you've a pet mouse and you've been painted as odd and quiet and shy, when really you're just a bit misunderstood. In any case, nobody at St. John's seemed lacking for companionship except her. But Tabitha reminded herself that there were far worse things than not having friends. In fact, she often made a game of listing far worse things: • eating the contents of a sneeze • creatures crawling into her ear holes. • losing a body part (Though that one was debatable depending on the part. An ear or small toe might be worth a friend or two.

I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.

Matters of days & Time. In dis life what matters is days and time your storm will be over. It takes God six days to creat the word and one day to rest. It takes nine for a child to form in the wormb. And a day to give brith. It takes a days and time to creat a friendship and one single lie to spoil the hole things. It takes years and tym to find true love and one single day to get married. No matter wha you are passing through one. Day is your day.

pring is a great time to introduce your children to the wonders of God's creation. Take them to a garden center and let them pick out a tree to be planted in your yard. Let them help dig the hole, add soil amendments, and place the tree. As they fill the hole around the tree, talk about how amazing God was when creating the world. Your children will love watching the tree grow through the years... as they grow with it. And remember when you used to press flowers in a scrapbook? Why not do it again? Use the pages of your phone book or apply heavy weight as you press and dry the flowers. When they're completely dry, use a tiny bit of glue to arrange them on colorful or white poster board. Add lace and ribbon, and you've got a perfect pressed flower arrangement. Or make it more masculine by adding graphics of sports, animals, cars, or trucks. ere's a tip that'll help in the dilemma of what to do with your various collections. Always arrange them in odd-numbered groupings. Three is a magic number. Cluster things that have differing shapes, but keep a theme going. ho is your best friend? Who is your second best friend? Now think about it. Is there really such a thing as a "bad" friend? Not all friendships are alike, to be sure. Some are casual and relaxing. Others are intense and stimulating. And some surprise us by seeming to come out of nowhere. Some friendships will fade ...a truth we have to accept. I have several "friends of the heart." These people aren't necessarily "best friends" because

Do you know that you can be surrounded by all these blessings, all these relationships, goodness, provisions, opportunities? But if you don't know how to turn the blessing into praise, it will turn into pride and your life will never be filled with joy because your heart has holes in it.

We simply don’t believe that friendship with the world is enmity with God (James 4:4). Many Christians have the mistaken notion that if only we were better Christians, everyone would appreciate us. They don’t realize that holiness comes with a cost. Sure, you can focus on the virtues the world likes. But if you pursue true religion that cares for orphans and promotes purity (James 1:27), you’ll lose some of the friends you were so desperate to make. Becoming a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, requires you to resist the world which wants to press you into its mold (Rom. 12:1–2). Saving yourself for marriage, staying sober on Friday night, turning down a promotion to stay at your church, refusing to say the f-word, turning off the television—these are the kinds of things the world doesn’t understand. Don’t expect them to. The world provides no cheerleaders on the pathway to godliness. THE

He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.

That’s love, my girl. At times, you feel like you could float above the ground, and, at other times, all you want to do is bury yourself in a hole to escape the horror of it. You have to be willing to take the good with the bad. Real love is not all flowers and romance. It’s gritty, and it’s hard. Those that are brave enough to really see the flaws of another person, and then accept them for it, will suffer pain like they’ve never felt before—but they will also experience love, friendship, and laughter like nothing the world has seen.

You may have herd the Yuman frase, What are frends for? Well, I will tell you. Frends are for, when your hole Groop terns its baks on you, here comes your frend, Fox 7, of who I spoke of erlyer, as being the first Fox I ever spoke Yuman to, troting up beside you.

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It’s not a black darkness. It’s simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I’ve heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It’s all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space.

Where would they be without each other to hold, to cling onto when the other was falling? Who else would grab and pull the hand of the other who was slipping down a dark hole, with no one else to understand them?

Books are a gateway. A black hole of endless possibilities. A place where soulmates meet and friendships thrive. A place where villains might proposer and heroes could fall. Here, worlds begin and reality fades. Here, lies imagination.

I’m realizing that sometimes when I don’t feel like I have the strength to do something on my own, I have people who love me who will pick up the slack and help get me out of this dark hole. Little by little I will dig myself out, but the task is so much easier when people are offering me a hand and cheering me on as I climb back up to the light.

It was when I said, “There is no such thing as the truth,” That the grapes seemed fatter. The fox ran out of his hole. You . . . You said “There are many truths, But they are not parts of a truth.” Then the tree, at night, began to change, Smoking through green and smoking blue. We were two figures in a wood. We said we stood alone. It was when I said, “Words are not forms of a single word. In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. The world must be measured by eye”; It was when you said, “The idols have seen lots of poverty, Snakes and gold and lice, But not the truth”; It was at that time, that the silence was largest And longest, the night was roundest, The fragrance of the autumn warmest, Closest and strongest.

The Meaning of Democracy.” The request got White thinking. “Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he wrote in the magazine. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.” “I love it!” Roosevelt said when he read the piece, which he would later quote, adding happily: “Them’s my sentiments exactly.” They were Churchill’s, too, though he would have phrased the point in a more ornate way. The Americans and the British, he said at Fulton in 1946, “must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence

She nodded. “If you change your mind, I will go with you.” A reflex of anger lashed out, furrowing my eyebrows, my voice sharp and cold. “I don’t want or need your help or pity.” “Good.” She held her ground against me, her voice challenging me. “I wasn’t giving you either.” I stared at her. “My friendship comes without pity, though support and compassion are always on offer.” Fuck. I was more than a massive a-hole. Blowing out, I tapped my fist against the metal chair, my shoulders relaxing. This girl was utterly amazing. And in a blink, she knew how to whip my ass and put me in my place.

All too easily we forget that the other guy, a hundred yards away, is just like us. Time and again, we fire at one another from a distance -- through social media or online forums, from the safety of wherever we're holed up. We let fear, ignorance, suspicion and stereotypes be our guides, making generalisations about people we've never met. But there's an alternative. Hatred can be transformed into friendship and bitter foes can shake hands. That's something we can believe in -- not because we're entitled to be naive, but because it actually happened.

Books are a gateway. A black hole of endless possibilities. A place where soulmates meet and friendships thrive. A place where villains might prosper and heroes could fall. Here, worlds begin and reality fades. Here, lies imagination.

Even now, not replying to his texts leaves a gaping hole like one in my favorite sweater that I wish wasn't there. But I either have to repair the sweater or throw it out. I haven't decided which is the best option yet.

The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. In a way, the Lynch brothers had always been the most important and truest definition of the Lynch family. Niall was often gone, and Aurora was present but amorphous. Childhood was the three of them tearing through the woods and fields around the Barns, setting things on fire and digging holes and wrestling. Secrets bound them together far more tightly than friendship ever could, and so even when they went to school, they remained the Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. Even after Niall died and Ronan and Declan had fought for a year, they'd remained tangled together, because hate binds as strongly as love. The Lynch brothers, the brothers Lynch. Ronan didn't know who he would be without them.

Why would I care what I look like when I’m constantly next to you? You are the very distraction that allows me to be such an invisible a**hole and I love that about you.

It’s not that I was jealous, really. Well, alright, I was, as I want to be just as comfortable with Edwards as she is with Seaton. But that kind of friendship takes more than a few weeks to develop. I needed to give this time. Stop thinking about it, Davenforth. Although, Seaton had barely known her a year, so that put a rather sizeable hole in the theory, didn’t it? STOP, Davenforth. Irritated with myself, I firmly put my mind onto a different train of thought before it spiraled even further along this ridiculous tangent

Among friends one remains the same age and in the same place where the friendship began.

All six children disappointed their father [Edward White Benson]. Martin, the eldest, was a paragon: brilliant at school, quiet, pious - his father's dream, He stuttered, which may reflect the strain of such perfection under such parents. His death at age seventeen tore a hole in his father that never healed. Nellie tried to be the perfect daughter - working with the poor, caring for her parents, gentle, but always willing to go for a hard gallop with her father for morning exercise. Her death at a young age, unmarried, was for the whole family an afterthought to the awfulness of Martin's loss. Arthur, Fred, and Hugh all found the Anglican religion of their father impossible. Arthur went to church, appreciated the music, the ceremony and its role in social order, but struggled with belief, even when he called out to God in the despair of his blackest depression. Fred was flippant and disengaged, and his first novel, Dodo, the hit of the season in 1893, outraged his father's sense of seriousness. Fred represented Britain at figure skating - a hobby that was as far as he could get from his father's ideals of social and religious commitment, the epitome of a 'waste of time.' Hugh's turn to the Roman Catholic Church was after his father's death - but like all the children, the fight with paternal authority never ceased. While his father was alive, Hugh muffed exams, wanted to go into the Indian Civil Service against his father's wished - he failed those exams too 0 and argued with everyone in the family petulantly. Maggie, too, was 'difficult': 'her friendships were seldom leisurely or refreshing things,' commented Arthur; Nellie more acerbic, added, 'If Maggie would only have an intimate relationship even with a cat, it would be a relief.' Her Oxford tutors found her 'remorseless.' At age twenty-five, still single, she did not know the facts of life. Over the years, her jealousy of her mother's companion Lucy Tait became more and more pronounced, as did her adoption of her father's expressions of strict disapproval. Her depressions turned to madness and violence, leading to her eventual hospitalization. There is another dramatic narrative, then, of the six children, all differently and profoundly scarred by their home life, which they wrote about and thought about repeatedly. Cross-currents of competition between the children, marked by a desperate need for intimacy, in tension with a restraint born of fear of violent emotion and profound distrust (at best) of sexual feeling, produced a fervid and damaging family dynamic. There is a story her of what it is like to grow up with a hugely successful, domineering, morally certain father, a mother who embodied the joys of intimacy but with other women - and of what the costs of public success from such a complex background are.

Dark Child by Stewart Stafford Moondust down the fire curtain Carried Syd to the darkest side, Trespass became a prison term, A non-compos mentis dark child. From gambolling nymph with a lute, To an imp falling over instruments, A thousand-yard stare sucked in, Vacant eyes drew like a black hole. Riderless horse, a living déjà vu, The spectral shell of our brother, Ambled towards us at his nadir, We wept for the shuffling stranger. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,’ said the unforgiving man. – 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – 'It was the vase,’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.

Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he wrote in the magazine. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.

In general, answers poured forth with relish and abandon, candor and hilarity, and a definite, conspiratorial tone. Most spouse-loving, successfully married wives freely admit that their husbands, at least some of the time, make them absolutely, nail-bitingly, hair-pullingly nuts. They describe wedded bliss as paradoxical between affection and affliction, desire and disgust, friendship and frenzy. This balance is nothing new. As brides, most of us enter our marriages starry eyed and hopeful, our vision obscured by romantic notions. Sometime after the honeymoon, however, reality begins to set in. To our shock and dismay, we find holes in our beloved’s socks and rust on his armor. We discover, in short, that Prince Charming has flaws.

As soon as I finished my last diary entry, I grabbed my books, stopped by André’s locker (hey, he’s part of my job duties!), and rushed straight to bio. But, unfortunately, I had arrived just seconds TOO LATE. . . . MACKENZIE SHOWS BRANDON THE PICS OF ANDRÉ AND ME! I just stood there FREAKING OUT as Brandon scrolled through the photos. He looked shocked, surprised, and hurt! All at the same time. . . . BRANDON LOOKS AT THE PICS! Right then all I wanted to do was dig a really deep hole right next to my desk, CRAWL into it, and DIE!! Once class started, I could practically feel Brandon staring at the back of my head. But whenever I turned around to make eye contact, he just gazed blankly at his bio book. Of course MacKenzie sat there with a big fat SMIRK on her face. She was SO proud of herself for pretty much DESTROYING my friendship with Brandon. I wanted to walk right up to her and say, “Congratulations, MacKenzie!” and give her a high five! In the FACE. With a CHAIR! Just kidding ! NOT ! Seriously! That girl is lucky I’m a very peaceful and nonviolent person. I just totally ignored her when she started EYEBALLING me all EVIL-LIKE. . . . MACKENZIE,

But those friends that were able to look into the ugly face of ALS and not turn away came to realize that the essence of George had survived this calamity, and for that they have been blessed with the ongoing gift of his love, his humor, his friendship, and an inspiration for life that comes from being around him.

Cooper, a host of works by American nature writers, and I’ve never in reading a single one of those pages felt one tenth of the emotion that fills me before these shores. And yet I’ll keep on reading, and writing. Two or three times an hour, a sharp crack breaks up my thoughts. The lake is shattering along a fault line. Like surf, birdsong, or the roar of waterfalls, the crumpling of an ice mass won’t keep us awake. A motor running, or someone snoring, or water dripping off a roof, on the other hand, is unbearable. I can’t help thinking of the dead. The thousands of Russians swallowed up by the lake.5 Do the souls of the drowned struggle to the surface? Can they get past the ice? Do they find the hole that opens up to the sky? Now there’s a touchy subject to raise with Christian fundamentalists. It took me five hours to reach Elohin. Volodya welcomed me with a hug and a “Hello, neighbor.” Now there are seven or eight of us around the wooden table dunking cookies in our tea: some fishermen passing through, myself, and our hosts. We talk about our lives and I’m exhausted already. Intoxicated by the potluck company, the fishermen argue, constantly correcting one another with grand gestures of disgust and jumping down one another’s throats. Cabins are prisons. Friendship doesn’t survive anything, not even togetherness. Outside the window, the wind keeps up its nonsense. Clouds of snow rush by with the regularity of phantom trains. I think about the titmouse. I miss it already. It’s crazy how quickly one becomes attached to creatures. I’m seized with pity for these struggling things. The titmice stay in the forest in the icy cold; they’re not snobs like swallows, which spend the winter in Egypt. After twenty minutes, we fall silent, and Volodya looks outside. He spends hours sitting in front of the window pane, his face half in shadow, half bathed in the light off the lake. The light gives him the craggy features of some heroic foot soldier. Time wields over skin the power water has over the earth. It digs deep as it passes. Evening, supper. A heated conversation with one of the fishermen, in which I learn that Jews run the world (but in France it’s the Arabs); Stalin, now there was a real leader; the Russians are invincible (that pipsqueak Hitler bit off more than he could chew); communism is a top-notch system; the Haitian earthquake was triggered by the shockwave from an American bomb; September 11 was a Yankee plot; gulag historians are unpatriotic; and the French are homosexuals. I think I’m going to space out my visits. FEBRUARY 26 Volodya and Irina live like tightrope walkers. They have no contact with the inhabitants on the other side of Baikal. No one crosses the lake. The opposite shore is another world, the one where the sun rises. Fishermen and inspectors living north or south of this station sometimes visit my hosts, who rarely venture into the mountains of their

You know Beau and I were close as kids…” I decided to start there. It seemed like the best place. “Oh good God, you mean to tell me this has something to do with Beau? Beau Vincent?” I cringed and nodded without glancing over at her. “Yes, it has everything to do with Beau,” I whispered. Leann’s hand covered mine, and I took some comfort in the gesture. “This summer Beau and I started spending time together. You were with Noah or working, and Sawyer was gone. I thought it would be good to rekindle the friendship Beau and I once shared.” Leann squeezed my hands, and I continued to explain how we’d played pool at the bar where his mother worked, went swimming at the hole, watched a movie at my house, and then I paused, knowing what I told her next was going to be hard for her to comprehend. After all, I was the good girl. “That night in the back of his truck, Beau and I…we”--I swallowed hard and squeezed my eyes shut--“had sex.” Leann let go of my hands and slipped her arm around my shoulders instead. “Wow” was her only response. “I know. It wasn’t the only time either and…and although I know it won’t happen again…I think…I think I love him. Maybe I always have. No. I know I always have. When I’m with Beau, I feel things I’ve never felt with Sawyer. I can be me. There’s no pretending. Beau knows my worst flaws.” “The heart wants who the heart wants. We can’t help that,” Leann said. I sighed and finally lifted my eyes to meet hers. The unshed tears blurred my vision. “But I’ve ruined his life. All he ever had was Sawyer. Make no mistake, I went after Beau. I can look back and see it now. This is all my fault. I should have never come between them.” I sniffled and buried my head in her shoulder. “Beau could have said no. He knew he was destroying his relationship with Sawyer every moment he spent with you. Don’t you take all the blame for this.” The stern tone in Leann’s voice only caused me to cry harder. Beau needed Sawyer. He might not have realized it, but he did. Somehow I had to make it right. “How do I fix this? How do I help Beau get Sawyer back?” “You can’t fix this for them. Beau knew what he was doing, Ash. He chose you over Sawyer. Now that you’ve let Sawyer go, are you going to choose Beau?” I wiped the tears from my cheeks and peered over at her. “Choosing Beau will cause everyone in Grove to hate him. They’ll all see him as the guy who took Sawyer’s girl away. I can’t do that to him.” Leann shrugged. “I don’t think Beau cares about everyone else. He made that apparent when he decided sneaking around with his cousin’s girl was what he wanted to do. He has to love you, Ash. Never in this lifetime would I have thought Beau would do anything to hurt Sawyer. He loves him. So that can only mean he loves you more.” She reached over to pay my shoulder. “Question is: Do you love him as fiercely? Are you willing to snub your nose at your family and the people in town in order to have him?

But here I am, having worked so hard and for so long that I’ve made myself sick. And worst of all, I’ve nearly forgotten how to rest. I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough. And my house—my beloved home—has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it. Since being signed off sick, I’ve been forced to lean back on the sofa and stare at the wreckage for hours at a time, wondering how the hell it got so bad. There’s not a single soothing place left in the house, where you can rest a while without being reminded that something needs to be mended or cleaned. The windows are clouded with the dusty veil of a hundred rainstorms. The varnish is wearing from the floorboards. The walls are dotted with nails that are missing their pictures or holes that should be filled and painted over. Even the television hangs at a drunken angle. When I stand on a chair and empty the top shelf in the wardrobe, I find that I have meant to replace the bedroom curtains at least three times in the last few years, and every bundle of fabric I’ve bought has ended up folded neatly and stowed away, entirely forgotten. That I’m noticing these things only now that I’m physically unable to remedy them feels like the kind of exquisite torture devised by vengeful Greek gods. But here it is: my winter. It’s an open invitation to transition into a more sustainable life and to wrest back control over the chaos I’ve created. It’s a moment when I have to step into solitude and contemplation. It’s also a moment when I have to walk away from old alliances, to let the strings of some friendships fall loose, if only for a while. It’s a path I’ve walked over and over again in my life. I have learned the skill set of wintering the hard way.